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Coyne: Virtue may be its own reward, but it does little for election chances

Canadians have been burned so often that we now pretty much assume all politicians are lying

Quebec Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard reneged on his promise to freeze the price of subsidized daycare for Quebecers. It's just one in a long line of broken promises by Canadian politicians, at both federal and provincial levels of government, writes Andrew Coyne. Photo: Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press files

Andrew Coyne

Published: November 24, 2014 - 8:14 PM

Updated: November 24, 2014 - 9:31 PM

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A party, let’s call them the Quebec Liberals, campaigns on a promise, say, to freeze the price of subsidized daycare, adjusting only for inflation. It attacks its opponents, call them the Parti Québécois, who had proposed raising it from $7 a day to $9, as heartless and out of touch.

Sure enough it is elected, only to propose scant months later — surprise! — an increase in daycare rates, to as much as $20 a day for the wealthy, with lesser but still substantial increases for any family earning more than $55,000 a year. Wait, you say you have heard this story? Many times? Only with different party names, and different promises? Well I told you to stop me.

It is indeed a very old story, though one told with growing frequency of late. In Manitoba, it was the New Democratic government of Greg Selinger, elected on a promise not to raise the provincial sales tax, only to raise it afterward, skipping the referendum required by provincial law in the bargain. In Ontario, it was the Liberals under Dalton McGuinty, elected on the identical pledge, and with the same result.

In British Columbia, it was Gordon Campbell’s Liberals — something about harmonizing the province’s sales tax with the federal goods and services tax, if memory serves. In Nova Scotia, it was Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats, who promised all sorts of things — no spending cuts, no tax increases, and balanced budgets to boot — but delivered none.

Nova Scotia premier Darrell Dexter (file photo)

And, of course, there is the spectacular series of broken promises — lies, in other words — on which successive federal governments have been elected, from Pierre Trudeau on wage and price controls (“zap, you’re frozen”) to Brian Mulroney on free trade (“we’ll have none of it”) to Jean Chrétien on the GST (“we will kill it”) to Stephen Harper on, oh I don’t know, pick one: income trusts?

All parties. Both levels of government. And not little slips of the lip, but deliberate statements on major issues, as often as not the centrepieces of their campaigns. I won’t pretend the Philippe Couillard government was elected solely on the strength of its daycare pledge, but it didn’t hurt; at the least, it took the issue off the table, preventing the PQ from campaigning against the cuts the Liberals would impose — or rather, have imposed.

Politics has never been a place for the uncompromisingly honest. It is, as Michael Ignatieff has lately described it, a “dirty, loud-mouthed, false, lying business.” But the dishonesty has gotten noticeably worse in recent years — more extreme, more brazen, without even the cover provided by those ancient dodges, to which the politician who does not wish to flat-out lie has always had recourse: evasion, ambiguity, the non-denial denial. Nowadays they don’t even bother.

The problem is not that they necessarily get away with it. Sometimes, as in the cases of premiers Campbell and, it would seem, Selinger, they get their comeuppance — though in other cases they get re-elected. The problem, rather, is that nobody is inclined to believe any of them any more, the honest politicians along with the dirty liars.

We’ve been burned so often, with such mounting shamelessness — remember McGuinty signing that “contract” with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation? — that we now pretty much assume they’re all lying. Certainly there’s no incentive to tell the truth, since there is no way for the honest pol to establish his bona fides. Virtue may be its own reward, but it doesn’t do much for your election chances.

Yet for all that we have allowed our politics to be overrun by this culture of dishonesty, we show no such tolerance of it in other fields. The Supreme Court of Canada has just handed down a ruling expanding upon the common-law obligations of businesses to deal in “good faith” with their customers — not just to live up to the letter of a contract, but the spirit of it as well.

But this is no more than the norm — outside of politics. Securities law prohibits a company from making claims on a prospectus that are even misleading, let alone materially false. Truth-in-advertising laws offer similar protection to consumers. There are laws against perjury and obstruction of justice, laws against fraud and misrepresentation, laws against libel and slander. Only in politics is it accepted that people can tell whatever lies they like.

Or at least, they can tell some sorts of lies. They can’t lie to each other, in Parliament or the legislatures. And they can’t lie about each other, at least under some provincial laws. But lie to the public? It’s open season.

To be sure, politics and private life are sufficiently different that the same solutions do not automatically recommend themselves. Corporate CEOs do not have teams of opposition researchers following them around, combing through their every public (or, increasingly, private) utterance in hopes of catching them in a contradiction. So measures to “ban” political lying, such as the advocacy group Democracy Watch has proposed, seem overdrawn.

But private life offers examples of another kind: voluntary, self-imposed measures that came into being precisely to address that problem I described — how to prove to people you’ve never dealt with before that you can be trusted. Bonded couriers, sworn affidavits, money-back guarantees: each involves the willing assumption of certain legal or financial consequences should a specific claim or promise prove false.

Is it so far-fetched to imagine devising some similar remedy for politics? Something with real teeth, but which politicians could opt into, at their discretion? Would the honest ones hesitate to do so (albeit with the same sorts of conditions and caveats that apply to private contracts)? And would those who refused not have some questions to answer?